Re: Progress toward making RDF easier?

Hello everyone,

the initial email chain on this topic contained several topics (and was 
followed by a discussion about their importance, but I will leave that 
discussion to others :) ). One of the topics was bringing forward 
rule-based reasoning in the Semantic Web.

As a reaction on that particular point, a call to action was issued 
regarding a W3C community group on the N3 rule language. We are happy to 
say that many people heeded this call – since then we’ve had a many 
fruitful discussions on its syntax, semantics and built-ins for 
real-world use cases, and made concrete progress towards its 
standardization. You can refer to its GitHub page 
<https://github.com/w3c/N3/issues> for details on these discussions.

We believe that N3 could represent a significant step forward in making 
RDF more usable:


  * /Writing N3 is easy/. N3 seamlessly extends the RDF Turtle syntax,
    introducing constructs such as embedded (“cited”) graphs and lists
    as first-class citizens, which solve well-known problems with RDF
    reification and first-rest RDF list chains.

    In fact, we’ve shown that N3 can support different semantics for
    embedded graphs out-of-the-box, and aligned these with the possible
    RDF dataset semantics [1].N3 has a model semantics that has been
    defined here [2, 3].

  * /You can write rules in N3/. One can directly write IF-THEN rules in
    N3, possibly accompanied with explicit quantifiers, to
    operationalize the N3 data. We point out that this avoids the
    impedence mismatch of other rule languages that require special
    effort for integration with RDF (e.g., RIF).

//

  * /You can utilize powerful N3 built-ins/. The goal is to give N3 the
    expressivity and tools to solve real-world problems – an N3 document
    should be a self-sufficient solution to a problem, and not require
    intervention from external software (again cfr. impedence mismatch).
    For instance, N3 implemented a (scoped) negation as failure from the
    start – other current proposals include built-ins for a kind of
    scoped universal quantification and non-monotonic features.

  * /You can directly consume Linked Data/. N3 has a set of built-ins
    that allow (a) retrieving Linked Data, (b) parsing it as N3, and (c)
    deriving conclusions from it. This makes N3 a language that is truly
    suitable for the Web of Data.

Of course, there is still much work to be done and we welcome everyone 
who is willing to help :). We are furthermore very interested in all 
discussions and suggestions to make rule-based reasoning a frequently 
used part of the Semantic Web.

Kind regards,
Dörthe Arndt an William van Woensel (on behalf of the N3 community group)



[1] D. Arndt and W. Van Woensel, “Towards supporting multiple semantics 
of named graphs using N3 rules 
<http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2438/paper6.pdf>,” presented at the 13th 
RuleML+RR 2019 Doctoral Consortium and Rule Challenge, Bolzano, Italy, 
2019, vol. 2438, pp. 1–15.

[2] D. Arndt, T. Schrijvers, J. De Roo, and R. Verborgh, “Implicit 
quantification made explicit : how to interpret blank nodes and 
universal variables in Notation3 Logic 
<https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8627430/file/8632611.pdf>,” 
/JOURNAL OF WEB SEMANTICS/, vol. 58, pp. 1–25, 2019.

[3] D. Arndt, “Notation3 as the unifying logic for the semantic web 
<https://github.com/doerthe/PhD/blob/master/main.pdf>,” Ghent 
University. Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, Ghent, Belgium, 2019.

Am 20.02.20 um 23:30 schrieb David Booth:
> In 2018 there was a big discussion about RDF being too hard for 
> *average* developers (middle 33%) to adopt, and why.  Ideas were 
> captured and discussion continued on the W3C EasierRDF github site:
> https://github.com/w3c/EasierRDF
>
> In 2019 the problem was discussed further both at the W3C Graph 
> Workshop in Berlin
> https://tinyurl.com/EasierBerlin
> and at the US Semantic Technology Symposium (US2TS) held at Duke 
> University:
> https://tinyurl.com/EasierDuke
>
> At the upcoming 2020 US2TS we will propose and discuss Next Steps 
> Toward Easier RDF:
> https://us2ts.org/program-easier-rdf
>
> However, in preparation for that event, I am curious to know what 
> significant progress others think has been made in the past year, 
> toward making RDF easier to adopt.  For example, one good resource 
> that came to my attention in the past year is the "Awesome Semantic 
> Web" list maintained on github:
> https://github.com/semantalytics/awesome-semantic-web
>
> What else?  Thoughts?
>
> Thanks,
> David Booth
>
-- 
Dörthe Arndt
Researcher Semantic Web
imec - Ghent University - IDLab | Faculty of Engineering and Architecture | Department of Electronics and Information Systems
Technologiepark-Zwijnaarde 122, 9052 Ghent, Belgium
t: +32 9 331 49 59 | e: doerthe.arndt@ugent.be